TALK RADIO WATCH

Hate soccer? You racist!

Kathy Shaidle is a blogging pioneer whose FiveFeetOfFury.com is now in its 12th year. Her most recent book â€“ "The Tyranny of Nice: How Canada Crushes Freedom in the Name of Human Rights, and Why It Matters to Americans" â€“ features an introduction by Rush Limbaugh guest host Mark Steyn.

“It’s not hard to draw a line from conservative opposition to soccer and their ongoing narrative about ‘taking back America.’ You know, before we played soccer. Or before illegal immigration? Or before racial integration?”

Well, it may not be hard for Slevin to “draw that line,” but I doubt most Americans would glean such sinister implications from a few minutes of corny soccer jokes on the radio.

Rush Limbaugh

“The greatest weekend of my life” – that’s how Rush Limbaugh described his recent wedding when he returned to the “golden EIB microphone” on Tuesday. Listeners were treated to a funny, touching and colorful reminiscence by their newly married host.

Rush noted that even though he’d been serenaded by a “gay” singer/songwriter (Elton John) after a ceremony officiated by an African-American pastor (Dr. Ken “Hutch” Hutcherson), he didn’t think his enemies would stop calling him a “bigot.”

Want to win a 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee? Sean Hannity announced a new video contest on Wednesday.

“You and I both love the United States and are grateful to our military forces: the courageous men and women at home, overseas, and on the front lines fighting for our country and our freedom each and every day,” Hannity said. “Now you have an opportunity to show your pride by creating an original video honoring and saluting our United States military.”

It was painful to listen to. Exercising incredible patience, Mark Levin tried to interview South Carolina Democrat Alvin Greene, a Senate candidate with a murky past and an apparent inability to answer simple questions – such as the name of his opponent, Republican Sen. Jim DeMint – without checking his notes (FREE audio).

Not surprisingly, Levin had a lot to say about Congressman Bob Etheridge, who assaulted a young man in broad daylight, in an incident captured on camera that quickly spread all over the Internet.

“Americans are boiling mad over the way Congress and this Marxist/Leninist-oriented president are manipulating the current economic crisis to nationalize businesses. They’re steamed over the fraud science used to support global warming – which is nothing more than a gigantic Ponzi scheme. They’re watching their life savings evaporate while the president saddles them with $3.6 trillion in new debt.”

In response to a caller, Savage said that if he could interview the president, he would ask, “Mr. Obama, if you had the power, would you cut me off from radio?” (FREE audio).

Even though he’d called in sick with laryngitis that night, Savage phoned in to his own show to critique Obama’s speech about BP and the oil spill (FREE audio).

G. Gordon Liddy

The Liddy created a stir among the national punditry this week. During an interview with Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, King told Liddy, “The president has demonstrated that he has a default mechanism in him that breaks down on the side of race – on the side that favors the black person.”

As some bloggers noted, however, Politico and other online pundits left out the rest of King’s comments, which are available here (FREE audio).

As always, Liddy welcomed guests you won’t hear anywhere else on talk radio, like the cast of the original “A-Team” television show and Pat Goodman, “the developer of a simple water-injection system that can increase gas mileage from 20 percent to 50 percent” – which gave Liddy a chance to wax rhapsodic about his favorite truck (FREE audio).

Laura Ingraham

Since the Gulf crisis began, Laura Ingraham has used her show to bring attention to the plight of ordinary business owners suffering due to the BP oil spill, and this week was no exception. Louisiana Foods CEO Jim Gossen gave listeners a sobering report from the scene.

On the same topic, Mitt Romney joined Ingraham to discuss how an experienced executive would manage such a crisis. Laura also had lots of fun with Obama’s insistence that he “couldn’t suck up the oil with a straw” (FREE audio).

Hugh Hewitt

Hugh Hewitt normally steers clear of “conspiracy theories,” but on Thursday he and guest Mark Steyn made a few points with sinister implications, albeit somewhat tongue-in-cheek.

Talking about the money the federal government is pledging to help victims of the BP catastrophe, Hewitt remarked sarcastically, “I think we’re going to find out that much to my surprise, [Obama's home town of] Chicago’s been deeply injured by the Gulf spill. Somehow, that money’s coming up to Illinois.”

Hewitt added later, “I don’t trust these people.”

Steyn put in, “I spoke … to a couple of serious Obama critics over here [in England] who claim that mysterious things have begun to happen to them since they criticized Obama.”

Unfortunately, at that moment, Hewitt’s segment with Steyn ran out of time. Let’s hope we get to hear more about these “mysterious things” at a later date.

Glenn Beck

Big news for Glenn Beck as KRLA in Los Angeles becomes his 400th radio-station affiliate. Mike Gallagher moves to a new time slot, and Hugh Hewitt’s show will be cut by one hour to make room.

After playing Barber’s latest attention-grabbing campaign ad, Beck denounced the commercial because, among other things, it featured actors dressed as Founding Fathers.

Which is kind of odd. First, because Beck has been responsible for reigniting public interest in America’s first leaders. And secondly, because Beck himself has dressed up in almost identical, colonial costumes during stage performances (FREE video).

In a disjointed rant, Schultz bellowed, “Man, we need an oil-spill song is what we need! Some idea, somewhere, some songwriter out there’s gotta come up with something, to remind us, just like Lee Greenwood reminded us that it was the right thing to do to love America and invade everybody.”

The trouble is that the actual lyrics of the song have nothing to do with “invading” anybody. Quite the opposite: Greenwood praises America’s heartland, but says nothing (good or bad) about other nations.

Any “imperialism” contained in the song exists solely in Schultz’s overheated imagination.